Old List of Klan Members Recalls Racist Past in an Indiana City

By DIRK JOHNSON

Published: August 2, 1995

NOBLESVILLE, Ind.—
When Don Roberts, a building contractor, opened an old trunk he found in a barn loft here recently, he discovered a list of signatures on brittle paper, dated in the early 1920's, bearing the names of some of the community's most prominent men of that era.

It was a membership list of the Ku Klux Klan from 1923 to 1926.

The find has forced this upscale city of 20,000 people, about 20 miles northeast of Indianapolis, to confront its racist past. Along with the Klan membership list, the trunk held hoods, sashes and a cross.

"It's meant some embarrassment, some shame, for our community," said David Heighway, the director of the Hamilton County Historical Society. "This is not a proud moment for us."

The material was initially turned over to the county's historian, 75-year-old Joe Burgess, who began, painstakingly, to type the name of every Klansman on the list to save it before the paper disintegrated.

As he typed, one name seemed to leap out at him: Claude Burgess, his father.

"I never knew," Mr. Burgess said.

The Klan membership list has become a touchy subject around town. When Mr. Burgess's 38-year-old daughter, Cindy, learned that her grandfather had been a Klansman, she became very upset. "I really didn't want to know that," she told her father heatedly.

She even objected to his having the Klan materials at home for historical research. "I want that stuff out of the house," she said she told her father. "I'm disgusted by it."

Downtown Noblesville, with its 19th-century courthouse set in the center of a square and old brick shops surrounding it, still has the look of a small Midwestern town, down to the park bench in front of the ice cream shop. But the corn fields that were long nearby have given way to subdivisions and strip malls.

Noblesville, the seat of Hamilton County, was a tightly knit farming town of about 5,000 people in the 1920's, a place where most people knew one another. But in the last generation it has become a bedroom community for people working in Indianapolis. And while there are still some families here that go back to the 20's, like the Burgesses, the majority have no connection to that era.

Still, down at the barber shop, customers grew defensive when a visitor brought up the subject. "It's a long time ago," said one man in his 60's, who declined to give his name. "Why stir it up?"

The historical society, after some debate, voted to accept the Klan list, but to restrict access to it.

"It would be embarrassing to some families" to publish the list, Mr. Heighway said, adding that threats of boycotts of merchants by the Klan also had to be considered. "There's an ethical question here, too, since we don't know how many people were forced to join the Klan."

The last living person on the list died several months ago, but the roster will still be made available only for scholastic or genealogical purposes. The Historical Society said it would require researchers to gain the consent of all descendants before publishing the name of any Klansman, a requirement that would seem virtually impossible to meet.

Some leaders of black organizations have objected to what they see as an effort to protect the anonymity of Klan members. John W. Jarrett, board chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in nearby Anderson, said people who had joined racist organizations should be exposed for what they believed.

"It should be a matter of public record," Mr. Jarrett said. "It would help people better understand their heritage, whether it be good or bad, so that generations can learn from it and hopefully correct the mistakes."

Klan membership in the early 1920's was stronger per capita in Indiana than anywhere else in the nation, said Allen Safianow, a history professor at Indiana University at Kokomo.

"There was a new wave of Klan activity in the North after 1915, focusing largely on Catholics, Jews and anyone foreign-born," Professor Safianow added, noting that it came on the heels of massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and at the height of public hysteria over the "Red Menace" posed by the Bolshevik revolution.

The rise of the Klan reflected national anxieties about the new immigrants and exacerbated those fears, scholars said. In May 1924, Congress passed the National Origins Act, which established a quota plan in which only 2 percent of the nationality that was in the United States in 1890 would be admitted. The quotas, which sharply restricted the number of Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrants, were abolished in 1965.

The induction of D. C. Stephenson as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, at a ceremony held in Kokomo on July 4, 1923, drew tens of thousands of supporters; it is considered by many scholars to be the largest single Klan gathering in the nation's history.

At the time, the Klan had close ties with many politicians in the Midwest, including Gov. Ed Jackson of Indiana. But after Mr. Stephenson was convicted of murder in 1925, the Klan was widely discredited, and its membership dropped sharply.

Today the Klan has fallen on hard times, said Joe Roy, the chief investigator for Klanwatch, an Alabama-based organization that monitors hate groups.

"The white supremacy movement is pretty much in disarray," Mr. Roy said, adding that lawsuits and Federal police efforts had severely weakened the Klan in the last decade.

"What's really hurting the movement -- but could ultimately save it -- is the militia phenomenon that's sweeping the country," he said. "It's soaking up a lot of potential Klan members."

Some older people in Hamilton County, while not defending the overt bigotry of the Klan, insist today that it was more of a social group than anything else. During the 1920's, they said, it was common for the local newspaper to include mention of Klan activities along with those of organizations like the Masons or Odd Fellows.

The Klan organized many "crusades" on what they viewed as moral concerns, chiefly pushing for the prohibition of alcohol and the closing of stores on Sundays.

A recent article in the local newspaper, The Daily Ledger, reported: "During the 1920's in Noblesville, virtually everyone was a Klansman. If you didn't belong to the Ku Klux Klan, you essentially weren't part of the community."

The degree of Klan viciousness in the 20's is vigorously debated by scholars. Professor Safianow said that while most agreed that the Klan of that era was pernicious, it was not as violent as it had been in the South in the 19th century, or as violent as the Klan is today.

There was a lynching in Marion, Ind., in 1930, when two blacks, jailed on charges of murder, were dragged from their cells by a mob and hanged from a tree. But the Klan's role in the hangings remains uncertain.

The mob had planned to lynch a third young black man, James Cameron, that day, but at the last moment decided against it. Mr. Cameron, who now runs the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, recalls seeing thousands of people in the mob, "acting like it was a picnic." He said robed members of the Klan were monitoring the crowd.

Growing up in Noblesville as one of the few blacks in town, Murphy White, now 72 and a member of the City Council, recalled some of the accepted bigotries of the day: blacks were required to sit in the balcony at movies, they were not allowed to sit at the drug store fountain and they were forbidden to swim in the public pool.

In the late 1940's, Mr. White and other blacks challenged the swimming pool prohibition, noting that their tax dollars were supporting the pool. As a compromise, the city offered to allow blacks to swim three days a week.

"We don't pay taxes just three days a week," Mr. White told city officials in rejecting the offer. In the end, he said, blacks simply went to the swimming pool, and the authorities relented and dropped the prohibition.

Mr. White, the only black member of the Noblesville High School class of 1941, recalled going on the senior class trip to Washington and not being allowed to stay in a hotel with whites. "So it wasn't just Noblesville," he said.

Some people have been calling the historical society to learn whether an ancestor was on the Klan list. Joe Roberts, a local lawyer whose family has been here for more than 100 years, was one of those "very disappointed" to learn that relatives on his mother's side had belonged to the Klan.

Mr. Roberts, 63, said the discovery of the Klan list has forced many townspeople to examine their consciences when it comes to race. "I look back and ask myself, 'Why wasn't I upset as a kid when black kids couldn't sit with us in the movie theater? Why wasn't I upset when they could not swim at the public swimming pool?' "

Photos: When the historian of Hamilton County in Indiana, Joe Burgess, was given a 1920's list of members of the Ku Klux Klan in the county seat, Noblesville, he began typing it to save it before the paper disintegrated. Then he stumbled across the name of his father. "I never knew," he said.; A Noblesville, Ind., contractor, Don Roberts, standing in front of the barn where he found lists of Ku Klux Klan members in the 1920's. (Photographs by Tom Strickland for The New York Times)